There are competing conceptions of democracy. In particular, the terms “democracy” and “democratic” have been defined by political philosophers and political scientists in many different ways. Which one is right? How should one choose among the proposed definitions? A democracy is perhaps always a State, but the adjective “democratic” is often applied to other entities as well; for example, org...

Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed has been a remarkable success over the last forty years. More countries than ever are now considered to be democratic or at least on their way to becoming democracies (Diamond 2007, Teorell 2010). Various international organizations that have democracy promotion on their agenda should nowadays be very content since there are cer...

1. E-democracy is the key for the future action As for the term “E-democracy”, many definitions focus on the usage of ICT into political process and public decisions based on needs of citizens. As the idea of e-democracy is continuously improved, my approach to e-democracy as a phenomenon resulting from the usage of ICT as a tool is to enhance democratic system of governance. There is no doubt ...

The correlation between social ties and political participation has been evident for some time, though very little attention is devoted to examining the causal mechanisms producing this relationship. This paper moves the literature in this direction by examining how an important feature of social networks – levels of political expertise – affect the attitudes underlying involvement. After outli...

In many parts of the world there is a growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of webbased group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly, non-sophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for de...

T o evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections o f the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that ...

The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...